Amazon is removing the “price band” shipping rate option effective June 30, 2025. Numerous sellers said that would be a problem for the types of items they sell. One seller explained the issue in a nutshell:
“Our products come in various sizes with dramatically different shipping costs. For example, smaller items may cost under $10 to ship, while the largest versions of the same product can cost close to $50 due to oversized packaging and carrier fees. Unfortunately, Amazon’s system does not support assigning variant-specific weights under a single listing when using customization or variation options. This makes weight-based or per-item rates unusable for us.”
Currently such sellers use price band shipping rates and are asking Amazon to reconsider doing away with the option.
A seller who sells Trading Cards & Figures on Amazon called the change a “poopshow.” “My cards I sell for cheap prices, and if it’s under $2, I have a shipping charge of the cost of a postal stamp added to it. With this new nonsense that Amazon is doing, I have to figure out what to do.”
Sellers said the only notice they received about the change was the following warning on the Shipping Templates page:
“WARNING: On June 30th 2025 Amazon will deprecate the option to set ‘price band’ shipping rates. Update your shipping templates now to switch from ‘price band’ rates to ‘per item’ or ‘weight’ rates for each region. Learn more about updating shipping rates.”
An Amazon moderator confirmed in a discussion board thread that sellers would not be able to select shipping rates based on price bands for seller-fulfilled orders for any new shipping templates; as of June 30, 2025, they must use the Per Item / Weight-Based rate model to set shipping fees on new templates. However, the moderator said, “Existing shipping templates that already have the price band rate model set won’t be affected.”
A seller thanked the moderator for his response and added the following:
“Could you please ensure the team implementing this change understands that weight-banded shipping is not possible for customized items where a selection (such as quantity) can greatly affect the weight?
“While we can use our existing templates for now, we will never again be able to create a template that matches our shipping needs and lets us offer customers the best possible shipping prices for customized items. I believe this is an oversight by the team implementing this change.”
In a different thread, an Amazon seller said in part: “Our standard products generally weigh between .5 – 1.5 pounds each, but orders from our customers can range from sales of one unit to multiple units (up to 150 pieces or more).”
In addition, the seller offers custom products that can weigh more than the same standard product: “From the information available, it appears that Amazon’s system does not support assigning variant-specific weights under a single listing when using customization or variation options. Price banded shipping has worked accurately for us and we’re concerned that weight-based or per-item rates might be problematic.”
The seller asked colleagues how they planned to handle the transition and said, “Appreciate any guidance Amazon moderators and/or other sellers can provide.”